All posts tagged: Switzerland

“Asselin’s Monsanto® is a courageous, investigative project that connects evidence-driven photography and visual research to the democratisation of knowledge; it’s important that this book exists in physical form, as a document, and not just in the virtual world,” says Cristiano Raimondi of Mathieu Asselin’s photobook Monsanto®. A Photographic Investigation. Raimondi is head of development and international projects at the New National Museum of Monaco and an invited curator for Platform 2017 at this year’s Paris Photo, but he’s speaking as a jury member for the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards because Asselin’s book has just won the prestigious First PhotoBook prize.

How to secure a country investigates the abstract concepts of border and security in one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. It’s a striking, forensic series, and it won Salvatore Vitale the first prize in the PH Museum 2017 Grant. Vitale started work on the project back in 2014, after Switzerland voted against mass immigration – resident in Switzerland for ten years, he was originally an immigrant from Italy. During his research, the word ‘security’ started to jump out, along with ‘border’ and ‘protection’ , he says, so he decided to try to visualise the concepts; it took him a whole year to get access to the security system, and when he did, “fate wanted it to be a border guard”. His images are clean and often deliberately devoid of people, an aesthetic that deliberately suits the topic and the country. It’s “an aseptic, almost clinical language that is part of Swiss culture”, he says, adding: “I rarely show people, because it was more important for me to show the dynamics of how the system works. It was …